The writer John Gardner said authors should consider the possibility that someone who picks up their novels may be contemplating suicide. (Don’t do it, reader!)

But how can writers be depended on to find a raison d’être for the reader’s life when so many can’t scrape one together for their own: Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Stefan Zweig, David Foster Wallace, Yukio Mishima? Don’t their suicides give the lie to the argument that stories are a source of life-giving wonder? Mostly, I would say, they are the efflux and chatter of wounded egos. I know a lot of writers and by and large they are a bunch of embittered narcissists, like me.

*

I WAS JUST THINKING it would be funny if I now turned my resentment on you, reader, and abused you for making things worse. That, after all, is how unhappy people usually behave: lashing out at the people closest to them. It would be a dangerous game, though. If you close the book in exasperation, I will actually cease to exist.

*

NOW THE DOWNSWING is levelling off. I can feel myself pulling out of the plummeting gloom. The key thing here is to avoid rocketing up into mania. Ease back on the stick, moderate the clever-dickery, and let’s get on with the story we’re charging good money to hear.

*

OVER THE NEXT few weeks, I spent more time with Francesca. She travelled by bus to the lido and whenever I saw her at the pool, I’d offer her a lift home and quiz her about her life, partly out of curiosity and partly in the selfish hope that I’d learn something I could use in a book. It turned out I was in luck.

She told me her father was from Genoa. He was a child of the ruota, the revolving hatch set in the walls of foundling hospitals in which unwed mothers deposited unwanted babies. The system, a curious blend of shame and compassion, was supposed to maintain the mother’s honour and the father’s anonymity. His surname, Dittami, was assigned to him on arrival. There were others like it – Esposito, Projetti, Ospizio, Casagrande – that marked their owners with a badge of disgrace. The word was that Vincenzo was the natural child of a village priest from Chiavari – and far from his only offspring.

He’d come to England as a teenager. His plan had been to travel to New York, but he only had enough money for passage to Liverpool and on his first week in the city he met Francesca’s mother and began to court her.

Francesca’s mother was the youngest daughter of a family of Irish immigrants. They looked kindly on the match: Vincenzo may have been Italian, but he was a Catholic and hard-working. He’d found himself a job with the Victograph Office Machine Company. Ambitious and personable, Vincenzo impressed his bosses and was offered a promotion to the head office in London, where he moved with his new bride shortly before World War I. He joined up, ready to serve his adoptive country, but his aptitude for fixing machines kept him away from the front line.